Nature | Race | Militarization

Nicolas Perret and Silvia Ploner produced this fantastic radio piece on the ideas developed in the “Manifesto for Abundant Futures,” a collaborative paper with Rosemary-Claire Collard and Jessica Dempsey. Check out the other pieces in this series of sonic expressions, imaginaries and thought that interrogate relations to nonhumans, nature, bodies, and matter.

Nicolas Perret and Silvia Ploner – Islands Songs – live and work in Berlin and Paris. With a syncretic approach towards sound, they orchestrate the uncertainty of the heard, frame perception as doubt and invite participation in the unknown. With recorded sound material as a base, they undertake long-term projects that result in radio pieces, sound installations, performances, and publications.

I was invited back to speak with Janice & Cory on their Roundhouse Radio show this afternoon. The topic: Trump’s Executive Order to build a wall on the U.S. southern border. Of course, there already are almost 700 miles of border wall, so we have to presume that Trump aims to extend the wall, though he said that the existing infrastructure is a fence, not a wall. Check it out!

The concept of the Anthropocene is creating new openings around the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment. In this article, we address one arena in which the Anthropocene is prompting a sea change: conservation. The path emerging in mainstream conservation is, we argue, neoliberal and postnatural. We propose an alternative path for multispecies abundance. By abundance we mean more diverse and autonomous forms of life and ways of living together. In considering how to enact multispecies worlds, we take inspiration from Indigenous and peasant movements across the globe as well as decolonial and postcolonial scholars. With decolonization as our principal political sensibility, we offer a manifesto for abundance and outline political strategies to reckon with colonial-capitalist ruins, enact pluriversality rather than universality, and recognize animal autonomy. We advance these strategies to support abundant socioecological futures.